Activate Self-Awareness to Cultivate Diverse Identities

Kids in the United States grow up in a society that privileges the experiences of certain racial, cultural, class, spiritual, gender, and ability identities over others. As a result, providers of education, healthcare, and social services, for example, are often unaware of the ways that systems can erase the diverse realities that kids experience -- especially for children of color. This erasure perpetuates a hierarchy that prevents every child from being safe and nurtured.

Innovative practitioners are reversing this status quo and creating ways for child-serving institutions and providers to not only acknowledge, but openly and actively cultivate every child’s identities.

Models often build safe spaces where children can develop skills like self-awareness and explore their multiple identities. When kids and the adults in their lives explore the value of diverse identities and their relationship with the world, they ultimately build an understanding of how they are uniquely able to shape the conditions around them.